Re: What's New in Xfce

Re: What's New in Xfce

Xfdesktop: Add optional blurring on shadow on text of icons. In general backported gtk+-3 code to implement it.. Add a new property called "shadow-blur-radius" on gtkrc file. If the "shadow-blur-radius" does not exist or is zero, it is shaded as before. If greater than 1, applies blur.

Here are some screenshots to demonstrate:Pre:Post:Pre (zoomed):Post (zoomed):

Re: What's New in Xfce

@ ToZ

Do you have any news/rumours about improvements in alacarte et al.?

I do not want to sound negative, getting a lot of goodies and still asking for more. I really like what I see here.

But I also see 1001 threads about problems in editing menus on various hardware, various distributions and, most worrying, various tools. I think that handling a menu would be a pretty isolated job from the XFCE package - but what else do they have in common??

Re: What's New in Xfce

Unfortunately, alacarte is not a "native" Xfce application. In fact, Xfce does not have a native menu editor. By "native", I mean there exists no such component/application in the official Xfce git tree. And as such, I haven't been really following 3rd-party applications. I have noticed, as you mention, many issues with graphically editing Xfce menus using alacarte or menulibre (I believe there is a 3rd one as well, but the name escapes me).

Alacarte is a simple menu editor for GNOME that uses the pyxdg library. It can create and edit menus and entries. It follows the freedesktop.org menu specification and so should work with any WM/DE that supports the spec.

Re: What's New in Xfce

One thing surprises me here: Alt-F3 brings up the Application Finder, and any menu entry can be right-clicked > Edit, where a number of aspects already can be changed. Since the GUI and the daemon are already available, how hard could it be to add other items that are in the desktop file, such as a check box for visible?

Bottom line: seems to me Xfce 10 is actually close to a native menu editor as it is, and that with a bit more work we would have a very useful tool. Or am I missing SOMETHING REALLY BIG?

Re: What's New in Xfce

I think I understand what the problem is - too many people involved.

The XFCE team of course, the alacarte (or other tool) team more related to Gnome, the distributions team and last but not least the team for the particular app (e.g. IDLE in my case). None of them is highly motivated to take care of the item.

I got a relatively poor result on making a new starter for IDLE. It did not show up in the submenu (category) 'Development' where I wanted it to be. It did not show up at all in the application finder and, if it had, changing the category would not have been an option.

So I took the manual approach which turned out to be rather cumbersome. There was no entry in /usr/share/applications and it took me some time to find it in ~/.local/share/applications/alacarte-made-xx.desktop. Sure its feasible to build a nice menu manually but it takes hours.